There’s actually more issues on the drinking, smoking, and generally not eating subject. If you’re fighting, or even just very physically active, you need to eat. That’s just non-negotiable.

We’re talking about a character that might be able to make it about 24 hours without a serious hit of protein before it starts to affect her. By three days, she’s going to be lightheaded after physical exertion, and might actually faint mid-fight.

As a quick guide, malnutrition will result in feelings of lethargy, which will get you killed in a fight. It slows down healing, and makes you more vulnerable to infections. Difficulty concentrating. Depression. Irritability, and difficulty staying warm, though the cigarettes would help with those two.

Staying warm might seem a little weird, but, remember, just like every other mammal, you (and your character) need to burn energy to maintain a constant body temperature. It’s actually a big part of why we have to eat as frequently as we do. If your character isn’t eating, over a period of time, her body will decide that’s less vital than maintaining a pulse, so she’ll have to work harder to stay warm.

And, make no mistake, if she’s not getting enough to eat, she is malnourished. For teenagers, persistent malnutrition can impair bone growth, meaning she’d actually be smaller than she would if she’d just eat a cheap burger every day. 5’10” is possible, but without malnutrition, she would have been huge.

Also, and I’m making an educated guess here, but if she’s suffering injuries that will result in scarring, she’s probably going to suffer a fatal infection long before her 5 years are up. Because her body simply won’t have the resources to fight it off.

Smoking isn’t automatically a deal breaker, but anything over a couple cigarettes a day is going to start cutting into her ability to fight. Now, nicotine does work as an appetite suppressant, but it won’t let her continue going after her body starts shutting down from malnutrition.

A habitual smoker will suffer impaired respiratory functioning, that means, once she starts fighting, she’s going to have to choose between fighting, and breathing.

Seriously, go look up smoking symptoms online. This does not mix with a highly active street fighter.

Also, smoking is expensive, a pack of cigarettes today (well, the last time I checked) is around $4 – $5 a pack, with 20 cigarettes per. If you’re smoking a common brand, a pack a day smoker will be going through roughly $120 to $150 a month. For a runaway on the streets, that is four to five months of burger money.

The problem with alcohol is a little different. When you fight, or are otherwise physically active, you sweat. For most people, this will never be a real issue. They’ll do something, sweat, stop doing the thing, and rehydrate. But, if your character is in prolonged combat, and an alcoholic, this will rapidly turn into dehydration.

So again, the symptoms to keep an eye out for are: weakness, dizziness, confusion, sluggishness, and fainting. As with malnutrition… in a fight those are all going to be an effective death sentence.

Also, because the body will try to generate a fever to deal with an infection, she’ll actually be losing even more moisture from sweating, leading to dehydration.

Some other fun stuff associated with an alcoholic combatant:

Habitual alcoholics develop a form of anemia, they face longer clotting times, and reduced healing. When combined with the malnutrition, your character will bleed for longer, and take a lot longer to heal her wounds. It might not be scars, it might actually be open wounds that just refuse to heal.

The anemia also results in easier busing, so, that will make her even more of a mess.

Dilatation of blood vessels which results in a loss of body heat, when combined with the malnutrition difficulty regulating body temperature… while I’m not sure exactly what would happen, it would be deeply unpleasant.

Alcohol dries out respiratory tissues (the sinuses and lungs), making them more vulnerable to infections, which she can’t fight off, because she’s malnourished.

Muscular atrophy, and myopathy (cramping, muscular pain, muscular degeneration, and weakness.) These are all chronic symptoms.

Two long term symptoms that, I’m not 100% certain of. Amenorreah can result in women skipping their menstrual period. I don’t know what that will do to a teenager. But, it’s just this side of possible she could completely shut down her ovaries. Also, I remember reading that, in a teenager, alcohol induced anemia will impair bone formation, resulting in weaker bones, though, I can’t find anything on the subject at the moment.

And, of course, as we’ve said before, combat takes a toll. I’m in my early thirties and there have been several points in my life where I’ve had to use a cane. My knees are beyond shot, and on a day to day basis I can feel bone on bone grinding. That’s without fighting every day. For someone who’s in constant combat every day, she’s going to be wrecked before she hits 20.

Also, if she’s malnourished, she’s going to slip into depression. That’s just her brain flipping her off and storming out of the room.

Okay, after all that, I almost don’t want to rake over the rest, but, here’s a few quick things:

In the words of Law & Order’s Lenny Briscoe: “You’ve got the flaw of most basically honest people. You’re a lousy liar.”

Honesty and lying don’t really work out well together. Someone from an abusive or dysfunctional family can easily end up as a fantastic (or terrible) liar, but they’re not going to be a basically honest person. For them, the truth becomes something that they’re punished for, so, more often than not, they’ll actually find lying more comfortable than telling the truth.

Car accidents that are severe enough to total a car (and kill someone) suck. Realistically, you’re going to keep finding new aches and pains for about a year. Even when you can walk away with a few scratches.

So, honestly, you probably need to ditch the malnutrition. Even if she’s getting enough to eat, while being highly active, she’s going to feel like she’s starving constantly anyway.

The alcoholism needs to go as well, that just wrecks the body in too many ways. When you combine it with malnutrition, you set up a vicious cycle that will kill your character.

Like I said, smoking isn’t a deal breaker, particularly if she’s scavenging for cigarettes when she can get them. It’s not healthy, but, it’s (ironically) a lesser evil here.

Finally, she can’t fight all the time. Well, she can, but realistically “all the time” means between 2 and 4 fights a week. Anything more than that and her body would just break down too fast for her to stay functional for more than a month.

what would happen if a character were shot in the thigh? would they die of blood loss or would it depend on where on the thigh the bullet went? also if the character somehow survived, would they be left with a scar or possibly a limp? eventually how long would they be limp (forever)? sorry for my english, and thank you!

If the bullet severs the femoral artery, death would occur within… I want to say two minutes, but it could be as much as five. If the bullet blows through cleanly, and the blood loss is managed, it shouldn’t result in anything more severe than scar tissue at the entrance and exit wounds. If it damages the bone and that’s not treated, or treated incorrectly, it would permanently impair movement (barring corrective surgery).

If the bullet tears up the muscle tissue, and it doesn’t heal properly, I think that would result in permanent mobility issues, but I’m not 100% certain how that would manifest.

Again, I’m not a medical professional; my familiarity with gunshot wounds is academic. So, I could be wrong here.

-Starke

EDIT: I’m going to attach this reblog to the main post because it’s actually really useful, and I did drop the ball a bit last night after tumblr ate my first draft of the entry and exit wounds answer. So, with thanks to Disasterintow.

Gunshot wounds vary depending on the type of round used, special attributes to the round (hollow point, armor piercing, etc), the distance from the shooter. A normal sized male (6’ 180lb) shot at close range to the thigh with a simple 9mm round would be in a lot of pain, but risks only moderate damage to bone, and supposing the femoral isn’t stuck, the most you would to be dealing is a hopeful through-and-through. That way, as mentioned before the most to be dealt with is stopping the blood flow and stitching up entry and exit wounds (the latter of which will be significantly larger).

Do. Not. Dig. A. Fragmented. Bullet. Out. Unless you are a skilled surgeon, though even these days, a majority of those professionals choose to leave non-life threatening shards inside. Removing the bullet damages muscle tissue, connective tissue, and tears nerves, all of which are needed to counteract the trauma of the initial wound. And you run the risk of more blood loss.

Now, when it comes to larger caliber bullets and shotgun shells, there is a problem with distance. Up close and personal, a .45 caliber handgun round could shatter bone and leave an exit wound the size of a Granny Smith apple. broken bones (shattered ones, at that) have a very high risk of sepsis, and if not dealt with quickly, could spread to the rest of the body.

AP rounds – Armor Piercing – go straight through flesh and have very little sign of slowing. There is risk to bones, however, as the amount of power (force) they carry with them hits full on if it meets a hard structure. The kinetic energy alone can fracture shoulder blades.

As for buck shot and slug for shotguns, those are trickier. They do need to be a certain distance to be effective, but make no mistake: these rounds will break bones and most certainly leave holes in you. Buckshot is pelleted, but deadly in a closer range.

A safe bet would be to say the person was shot by a .40 caliber or lower handgun, or anything around or lower than a .308 rifle round, and that the meat of the thigh took the bullet. If at a decently close range, that person should survive and most likely walk with a little hitch for most of their lives. Nothing too noticeable, however. There would certainly be scarring, and if nothing happened to bone, and no nerves were injured, there should be no loss in range of motion or use.

Any advice for wiring a 1865 duel scene where someone gets shot in the hand, or for a scene of the same period where someone gets shot in the ear through a window? I really love the blog btw

In both cases, post injury infection is a real risk. And, your characters would run a very real risk of dying.

Not that anyone in your setting would know, but; the bullets themselves are clean, the gunshot generates enough heat to sterilize the bullet. However, the bandages used on the wound wouldn’t, and, historically, these were a common vector for bacterial infection.

Hilariously enough, in both cases, medical treatment would actually be more dangerous than the wounds themselves. But, again, and I can’t stress this enough, your characters would not know this.

Alcohol was viewed as an emergency anesthetic, not an antiseptic.

Also, without access to modern surgical techniques, getting shot through the hand could easily result in a permanent crippling injury.

Now, intentionally shooting someone in the hand, with weapons from that era, wouldn’t be impossible, but it would require an improbable degree of marksmanship.

Even with highly accurate, modern handguns, “disabling shots” like that aren’t really viable in combat. The amount of focus and precision required just aren’t available while someone is fighting through an adrenaline rush.

How would my character disarm the girl who is aiming a handgun at him? She doesn’t intend to shoot (although he doesn’t know that), and he doesn’t want to hurt her, just get the gun away from her. It’s his way of proving to her who he is (because he has the ability to disarm her). Everything I’ve looked up online for it includes hurting the attacker as some kind of defense mechanism.

It’s not a defense mechanism, it’s necessity. This is a culmination of a couple issues that we haven’t really covered in detail.

The first is reasonable force; basically, this is the absolute minimum amount of harm you need to inflict in a given situation to ensure your safety and the safety of others, including the person trying to kill you. Make no mistake, if someone’s pointing a gun at you, they are trying to kill you. (I’ll come back to this in a minute.)

The more training your character has, then under the law, the less harm they’re allowed to legally inflict. This is because restraining your opponent without hurting them is a lot harder, and requires more skill, than simply killing them.

Reasonable force is a bit of a pain because it is very subjective in the moment. It scales upwards based on a lot of factors, including the nature of the threat. If someone is threatening to “beat the shit out of you,” responding by crippling or killing them is (usually) going to be considered excessive.

Guns take that and toss it all out the window. Pointing one at someone is always a threat of lethal force. It doesn’t matter what the person with the gun intends. It is the weapon not the person that escalates the threat.

The second major issue is that gun disarms are really hard, and really, really dangerous. Most martial artists that attempt to use them in actual situations get shot. It’s a ratio close to 9/10, that’s 9 get shot to every one that 1 succeeds. Often, even if the disarm is successful, they get shot anyway during the attempt. An attacker who is already jittery on adrenaline will take the fast movement of the disarm i.e. the person moving towards them as a threatening gesture. They may fire reflexively, even if they didn’t originally intend to. The response evokes “oh my god, they’re attacking me” and that instinctive response will be even stronger and more immediate in someone who is untrained. This may also force a switch over in the attacker themselves from “I don’t want to hurt you” to “I’m going to shoot you because now you’re threatening my life”. It may not seem logical when they’re already holding the gun, but within their mind it is. An attack/disarm will escalate the situation because it shows them that the person they’re pointing the gun at (whom they may trust) is willing to hurt them or even shoot them. The person who is attempting the disarm is taking their power away from them and that is threatening, especially to someone who doesn’t know what they are doing. If the gun is all they have to control the situation then they won’t let it go without a fight.

With most techniques, the consequences for not executing them perfectly are fairly limited, you might take a blow you didn’t want to, or strike with less force than you intended. But, for gun disarms, failing to execute the technique flawlessly can be fatal.

What this means is, when it comes to gun disarms, the priority has been to develop simple techniques that work, and screw everything else. Gun disarms are, as a general rule, easy to learn, but, they also come without any margin for error.

The result is, most gun disarms will wrench joints and break bones. Most disarms can escalate into kills, because they leave the martial artist with the gun in a ready to fire state. The martial artist themselves may accidentally shoot their attacker once they get the gun away from them because they are also jittery with adrenaline and they left their finger on the trigger. Disarms end with the gun pointed at the attacker. Once adrenaline gets factored in, it can be very difficult to not follow through with an execution shot. With the exception of outright shooting the gunman, this is all pretty solidly reasonable force. Many instructors suggest for students who are unused to guns to brace it on their hip, instead of holding it out in a ready to fire state, as this reduces the risk of them accidentally shooting the attacker or their attacker taking it back.

Finally, and this is a general threat assessment issue, but it does affect disarms. Untrained shooters are much more dangerous. Once the shooting starts, a trained shooter is going to be able to kill more efficiently, but an untrained shooter is more likely to shoot someone by accident.

If you have a character pointing a gun at someone they don’t want to hurt (outside of some edge, “I don’t want to hurt you; but, I will kill you,” cases), they’re not going to be trained in firearms safety.

What this means is, and I hate harp on this over and over, but, when you have a character pointing a gun at someone, they’re always threatening to kill the other person. Even if they gun isn’t loaded, even if they don’t want to hurt anyone, even if they just want attention. They’re still threatening to kill someone.

I’d actually argue that a trained shooter is safer to disarm, as well. Proper trigger discipline can work against getting a rapid shot off into the martial artist. Of course a “safer” version of an extremely lethal situation is still quite dangerous.

Now, non-harmful gun disarms do exist. But, they’re not a part of any martial art. Stage fighting includes a lot of techniques that can be practiced safely. The problem is, as a general rule, stage fighting is cooperative choreography between two performers. So the gun disarms you’ll see on TV that leave both combatants with all their fingers in the original sockets aren’t real combat techniques.

If you want to look at getting a gun away from someone safely, I’d recommend watching The Negotiator, it’s not about martial arts, but it is about talking people down.

Sorry, I didn’t want to be specific because I tried to keep it short and to the point. However, I can think of a lot of reasons why guns might fall out of favor. Mostly, it’d come as armor. Kevlar is fantastic against bullets, but has a weakness stabbing. Just take that to 11. Another might be like Dune, a sort of energy shield that stops high velocity impacts, but doesn’t stop low velocity. Anyways, I’m mostly curious what could be modern sword technology, (nano-tech and cryoforge, apparently).

With the caveat that it’s been a few years since I read Dune, a few things stand out: I wouldn’t call the year 10,000 the near future. Dune is, very much, a post apocalyptic setting; humanity is in the process of recovering from domination by autonomous AIs. I’m not sure if this was a jab at Asimov, but, regardless.

And, personal shields are very rare, very expensive, and extremely fragile pieces of equipment. House Atredies is able to afford a few of them. This is one of the most powerful members of the LANSRAD, and an incredibly wealthy family.

So, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the combat we see might not be completely representative of warfare in the setting. That said, when actual battles occur, the great houses and the Sardukar have no qualms in breaking out lasguns.

The personal shields can’t handle fire from lasguns, so ranged weapons remain preferable on the whole, and really only work against sword strikes. Hence the whole, “a slow blade penetrates,” because a normal blade strike will reflect off. I can’t remember if the shields could survive normal firearms in the setting, but they certainly didn’t change the nature of war in Dune.

The blade fighting in the novels is, almost exclusively, the purview of dueling, and while houses have “swordmasters”, the actual weapon of choice is long knives.

I will say; Warhammer 40k, Dune, and Star Wars all make for fairly reasonable uses of melee weapons in a sci fi context. Lightsabers have ways to stay effective against ranged foes (so long as they’re backed up with superpowers), 40k is loaded to the gills with things that won’t die from sustained bolter fire and ludicrously lethal melee weapons, finally; Dune has a fairly rich dueling tradition. But, I wouldn’t hold any of those up as justifications for a near future setting.

On the subject of Kevlar, it’s actually been improving at a fairly steady pace. Used to be, 9mm rounds posed a serious threat to someone, and now we’ve gotten to the point where a vest can take an intermediate rifle round at medium range.

The problem with Kevlar is one of the basic constants of the universe, entropy. While a modern Kevlar vest will stop a 5.56mm rifle round, at 50m, when you start getting closer, or taking more fire, the vest will fail.

I’ll add a primer on modern body armor, because this one can get a bit complicated, though fair warning, I’ll probably do that after I’ve done most of my firearms primers. If you want to do some research now, I’d recommend looking into Kevlar, and ceramic inserts. Also if you start feeling too cocky about body armor, look up the history of the 10mm handgun round, and steel core ammunition. If you want a setting where you can use a sword in a gunfight and live, I’d suggest Warhammer 40k. It’s comically over the top, but there’s some coherent world building, and it does present you with the kinds of things you’d need to be dealing with to see swords really return to the battlefield.

When I was little, I figured the only way somebody under sixteen could make money was by writing a book. After I turned sixteen, I decided to stick with it so I could get my ideas out.

What about you?

Michi: My Nana used to tell me stories, but she would have me make up the characters that were in them. I loved it and reading so much that I decided telling stories was all I ever wanted to do. Then, I got older and realized how much impact those stories and some of the ones I’d read in my teens had on me, how important they were, and what I’d learned from them. I wanted to give back to those authors and to the other potential people like me out there by building off those values and ideals in my own work.

Love this blog, realistic fighting is one thing you can’t get a feel for from research. Do you have any recommendations for things to keep in mind when two people are fighting as a team against several bad guys? Assuming the two train together and fight together fairly often.

The tactics will change substantially between characters and situation depending on whether or not they’re carrying guns or were trained in a military context. I say military over police or FBI because the military training is all about protecting, defending, and attacking as a unit, not as an individual. Since yours are probably not and I’m guessing you mean hand to hand, I’ll give my advice from that outlook.

Assuming your two characters view each other as evenly matched (and one won’t try to take the brunt of the opposing force on their own), they’re more likely to know each others weaknesses and trust in each others strengths. There will be a level of trust there that will for the most part ensure that they won’t get in each others way.

And while fighting back to back sounds good in theory (it looks great in a movie!) but in a group, it’s terrible. Because of the amount of pushing and jostling that goes on and because standing still is an unbelievably bad idea (unless you’re an Aikido or Tai Chi practioner), they’re more likely to split a group of enemies up evenly by pulling them off in different directions and fighting alone. This way, they’ll be free to drag their own opponents into each other without having to worry about screwing over their partner by accident (and accidents always happen). Remember, in hand to hand, a character can only really reliably fight one opponent at a time, so when fighting against groups, it’s a lot of bouncing around trying to get their opponents to hit each other instead of them, so they can conserve energy.

It also gives you the opportunity to build in narrative tension if there’s an uneven number of opponents, if the opponents in one fight are more coordinated than usual and refuse to be baited from going after their primary target, and things start going south. Remember, bad guys, even one-off ones are people too and some of them also have a history of fighting together. You can get a lot with just a little work on random mook motivation.

As with anything, the more opponents there are, the greater the chance for failure. To stay realistic, try to keep it between four or six (two and three per fighter). Finally, it’s important to keep in mind in fights that things always go wrong or in an unexpected direction on some level for both parties. The personalities of your characters and their own fighting outlook will affect the fight just as much as their technique. A good fighter doesn’t play around with their opponent, but a lot do anyway.

I’m the anon asking about the character who lived the majority of his life in South America. I forgot to mention that he lived a large chunk of his life in poor areas, frequently moving due to trouble his family would get into, and so there were times were he lived in the streets.

The two most major Brazilian MAs I know of are Capoeira, a martial art that is descended from Africa and was created by the slaves as a method to retain their fighting traditions by hiding them as a form of dance, the other is Brazilian Jiu-jutsu, as you mentioned. I think the most important thing to remember about all traditional MAs is that they take time to learn, if your character moved around a lot then he would constantly have to be finding new schools and instructors to train him. He most likely would spend a good portion of his time covering the basics that he already knew as the instructors established for themselves what he already knows and what he doesn’t. His skill would be decided mostly by how much time he spent training outside of lessons. Also, remember that MA training through a professional school can be both expensive and time consuming, expect the lessons to take up a half hour to an hour of his time no less than three to five times per week on regular intervals. If he is trained by a specific instructor on a personal basis, then it could be a lot more. If he is trained by his parents (the easiest under the circumstances) it may be his whole life like a lot of the kids I knew whose parents were instructors.

Decide this for yourself.

If he lives on the streets and you want a martial art that is specifically Brazilian, I’d suggest Capoeira. It involves dancing, tumbling, and other exercises that make it more of a stealth MA and he could make money off his skills as a street performer. It is a very unique style, however, so make sure you’re comfortable with writing it.

Other than that, it may be he picked up his skills from a non-professional source such as the local gangs and other forms of general street fighting. A character can still be an effective fighter from a non-traditional background, especially if he’s fighting other non-professionally trained combatants. It’s only when we get into it with professionals (of varying degrees of efficiency) that the shit really starts to hit the fan.

I was wondering what kind of character advice/resources you would give to someone who wants to write from about serial killer who is a woman? The things they would have to consider? –swelldame

It is interesting that while we have done and written things on…

If you want to write about serial killers then Whoever Fights Monsters by Robert K. Ressler and Tom Shachtman is a must and required reading. The book is written by a former FBI agent sharing over twenty years of his experience hunting serial killers, it’s an in depth look at some of his case files. While this won’t tell you about female serial killers, it’s a good start on learning about the psychological profiling and what we know about male serial killer motivation. It’s a gory read though, so spend some time preparing your stomach before you start.

When it comes to female serial killers, you’re in for a hard road. While there is a lot of information out there about male serial killers in general, females often go unnoticed by law enforcement because they don’t fit the pattern. The best advice I have on that subject is to spend time learning what those patterns are that we look for and figuring out how to subvert them.

When it’s a scientific field. If you want to include lots of biology in your book, you’d better know more than ninth grade biology.

When it’s another culture, or even your own culture in the past. If you rely on only prior knowledge and…

Combat. Any kind of combat, really. It’s not about finding the “best” gun or the “best” form or martial art, or the best kind of anything, because that doesn’t really enter into it. An author needs to understands the martial art and the psychology behind it in order to make it work in their story. It’s not uncommon for a character to completely and be unrealistic, because many writers do think that watching a few action movies is enough.

Guns are not interchangeable, from handguns to rifles. A character who uses a Glock will use it and fire it differently than a 1911. Even your lowest capacity Glock will have nearly double the magazine capacity of a 1911, which changes the way ammunition is handled and fired. A 1911 has a seven round magazine, which means the character will be conservative, it means firing a single round down range. Don’t waste ammo you don’t have, while even the lowest capacity full frame Glocks carry nearly twice that much. With a Glock because you have more ammo in the magazine, because of the way pistols handle, there’s a serious advantage to grouping your shots into bursts.

Each gun comes with it’s own advantages, it’s just the style that matters and what that says about your character’s personality.

Combat from hand to hand to ranged fighting to swords has a unique science all it’s own and it requires research to understand the physical aspects of it, before we even get into the psychological side of the training.

And there is a serious psychology behind it, a character who is a professional combatant thinks differently from one who is not. The way they approach and see the world will be influenced by how much training they have and what they have been trained in. A soldier thinks differently from a spy and a spy thinks differently from an assassin (and two of these are not really combatants) and all three think differently from what a cop will prioritize or how a classically trained martial artist will approach any situation.